Overview Edublogs Serendipity webinar – Skills for online teaching

Posted on November 15, 2010 by johart1

Introduction

For this recorded Serendipity unconference webinar we took a brief look at the skills needed for online teaching and at how we could gain those skills. Unusually for our sessions all of us attending were based in Australia – I suspect this was because most of the USA has just had a clock change with clocks going back one hour. Changes to and from “summer time” always have an impact on the geographical locations of our attendees for a couple of weeks.

The Session

We used whiteboard and text chat a lot during this session as well as audio because we had people without microphones, so it was very much a blended session. Lots of ideas and suggestions were made on the whiteboard both for the skills needed and how to gain them.

From my perspective this session was particularly interesting for two reasons:

at the moment my teaching is entirely online with regional students that I never meet
we didn’t initially seek a common interpretation of teaching online so this meant that in discussion we “blurred the edges” a bit and went partly into the skills needed to use tech in teaching

This is a good thing for me to reflect on as I often suggest once a topic is chosen that we seek a common interpretation before we start the discussion. However in unconference webinars such as Serendipity should I even be doing this? What do you think?

Conclusion

This session was fun – we went a bit feral at the end and played with Elluminate giving everyone Moderator so that they could see the extra tools available to moderators.

Exciting News – Upcoming Conference!

Remember to check out the sessions at the Global Education Conference happening all of this coming week. There is no registration required you just click on the Elluminate link (these will be available from the session information).

The theme is “globally connected education” and is totally cross-sectoral aimed at anyone involved in any way in education and/or training. There are sessions on many different aspects of online collaboration and connection betweeen students, educators and the wider global community.

There are around 350 presenters from all over the world (including a session about our Serendipity/Fine focus webinar series at 01:00 GMT/UTC on Friday – one hour after the end of the usual Fine Focus session).

We would love your input/participation in the session, especially so if you have participated in the Serendipity/Fine Focus series of webinars as they have evolved. This is an opportunity for us to look at where we are and consider our future direction!

Our Next Session

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week in “Conferences – they are a’changing” will be a discussion about the changing face of conferences and some of the pro’s and con’s of the old and new style of conference.

.Join us on Thursday Nov 18^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight CET) or Friday Nov 19^th at 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.

Overview Edublogs webinar – Face to Facebook!

Posted on November 7, 2010 by johart1

Introduction

In this Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here) Jane Curry (@parrpakala on Twitter) introduced us to the way she is using Facebook to enhance and improve the learning experience for “English as a Second Language” learners. This was an exciting session not only because of the way that Jane is incorporating Facebook but because she also included some of her students in the session. Jane teaches English as a second language at Swinburne TAFE (public vocational education) in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Jane’s students are migrants/refugees. Migrants to Australia have an entitlement to some English language classes when they arrive. The programme usually used is the Certificates in Spoken and Written English (CSWE). This is multi level and outcomes based, students need to demonstrate that they can read, speak and write to the relevant level. So any opportunity to practise reading, writing or other forms of communication in different ways is very welcome.

The Session
Jane started the session by telling us a little about her students and their backgrounds. Facebook is a relatively recent introduction, the students also participate in a class blog. Jane talked about her reasons for using Facebook and also some of the advantages in that it allowed easy communication between the students, volunteer mentors and lecturers. It was also easy for two organisations, CMY and Foundation House that provide support for the students, to join in through Facebook. Jane shared her desktop to show us the group’s Facebook page …

and also demonstrated how she uses live chat with her students. There were a variety of questions and ideas raised in text chat around the practicalities of using Facebook particularly with second language learners and privacy issues relating to its use. Jane responded to these during the session. The highlight was when two of Jane’s students bravely joined her at the microphone and answered some questions from us about: where they were from; what they though about using Facebook; and whether they had Facebook friends elsewhere.

Conclusion

This session was very exciting as it is the first time we have had students taking part in this way and I think that both Jane and her students were very brave to be prepared to do this. Jane did a great job, she has not had the opportunity to join many sessions as her class coincides with webinar times and this was her very first session as a moderator. As always this overview gives only a taste of the session. For the full “flavour” catch the recording.

Next Week

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session, one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic. Then join us on Thursday Nov 11^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Nov 12^th at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

Webinar Overview – Going Live & Paperless with GoogleDocs

Posted on September 11, 2010 by johart1

Introduction

This fantastic Edublogs Fine Focus session (recording here) was a follow up to a quick and impromtu look at GoogleDocs in a Serendipity session a few weeks ago when we were lucky enough to have Rachael Colley (@burntsugar) with us when GoogleDocs was the chosen topic. In that short time Rachael gave us a quick look at some of the GoogleDocs features and whetted our appetites for more! So this week she was back with us to give us a more extended look at how she goes live and paperless in using GoogleDocs with her students.

The Session

This was very interactive and great fun! Rachael set up a doc for us to play with – she gave us a link for a fill in Google form so that we could submit our emails to enable her to give us access to the doc. This gave us all an opportunity to add our own comments to the sample doc – Rachael has now made this doc public for us and locked the editing so you can see what we wrote! We were also writing in the live chat and comments on the doc, so with the Elluminate chat as well it felt as if we had four backchannels all going at once. As usual the Elluminate chat window was scrolling fast with comments, questions, tips and ideas. Throughout this Rachael also application shared through Elluminate – very useful for anyone who had not been able to access the doc for some reason – and also great for showing us where to find features such as the live chat.

Again through application share, Rachael showed us examples of how she has all her course resources in GoogleDocs and uses a blend of the available tools to give her students different levels of access depending on the purpose of the resource.

Conclusion

This was a terrific session with so much going on that the time flew by even faster than usual in these webinars. I learnt so much and will definitely be using Googledocs with my distance students. I try to avoid anything with my students that is locked into a particular word processor as they don’t all have up to date word processing on their computers and I have been struggling to find a good practical solution (other than a word processed doc with spaces) to filling in questionnaires that enables them to keep a copy and also to submit the doc to me. Now thanks to Rachael I think I have the answer! It is well worth catching the recording as there is so much to see.

Next Week

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session, one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic. Then join us on Thursday Sept 16^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Sept 17^th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

Webinar Overview – Imagine Your Image

Posted on July 5, 2010 by johart1

Our most recent recorded webinar was a “Techie How To” in which we looked at some of the tools in a simple free image editor – PhotoFiltre. I use PhotoFiltre a lot because I rarely need the more sophisticated features such as layers. This was one of those sessions where I did the presentation as well as facilitating. I always find it more difficult to write an overview for these as I feel too close to the content to be as objective as I should be. I always welcome comments on any of these webinar overviews but particularly so when I have presented the content and thus am not sure about my own objectivity!

The Session

I very much enjoyed doing this session – as I was able to show one of my favourite “e-toys” (PhotoFiltre) through the medium of another (Elluminate). We began by finding out where we were all coming from on image file formats and editing, followed by some quick thoughts on why we and our students might want to edit images.

Size changing and cropping (used most by my students, my colleagues and myself) were both suggested several times. We then moved on to consider briefly the features of a basic image editing application that we would consider most important for ourselves and for our students. Easy to learn and free topped the polls.

Next we took a quick look at the accessibility and functions of some of the most frequently used tools (all on drop-down menus). Size is one of the most significant items that we all often need to change to suit different contexts so we looked briefly at some common sizes we might use and also at the impact of when we make the change on file sizes and consequent download times. Other tools briefly reviewed included cropping, adjusting colour balance, brightness/contrast and filter effects.

Then it was time to play! I shared PhotoFiltre from my desktop and invited participants to try out some of the tools on some pre-loaded images by taking control of my desktop. Using application share in this way has some limitations – for example there is an inevitable lag in response when the mouse is being controlled remotely. However I feel that it has great benefits from the interactivity point of view and is more effective than simply using the sharing to demonstrate. I would love some feedback on this! We finished the session as usual with questions and feedback.

Conclusion

My personal liking for PhotoFiltre is because it is easy to use and free to download and is thus a good option for my students who are literacy/numeracy students working online. They often have both limited access to computers and limited IT skills. I have also suggested it to many of my colleagues as they rarely need sophisticated editing capacity such as layers and they also find it very useful for basic cropping and size changing especially of images they intend to upload into the Learning Management System. If you do need features such as layers then you could take a look at GIMP also free.

Next Webinar

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday July 8^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 9^th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

Serendipity webinar overview – Web 3.0 where to now?

Posted on June 17, 2010 by johart1

Introduction

This was one of those small but very active sessions (recording here) where the blend of text, whiteboards and audio was almost seamless with all three being used in the conversation. The best way to checkout this session is to catch the recording.

The session

We started with some discussion on what we understood by the term Web 3.0. This included references to:

semantic tagging;
small, fast, customisable, virally distributed applications
contextual, tailored, predictive searching
deductive reasoning “intelligence”

The discussion moved on with most of the focus being on the issues around the tagging, searching and “intelligence” aspects. Particular concerns were expressed about the impacts and influences of this type of search on independence of mind and thought.

Conclusion

This session was very thought provoking and more thoughts and implications are still striking me some days after the session. I suspect this is very much a theme for further exploration in a Fine Focus discussion in the not too distant future.

Next Week

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus!” session a “Techie How To” – “Introducing Scratch” from guest presenter Carl Bogardus (@weemooseus). Carl will give us an introduction to using Scratch. An easy to use programming language that you and your students can use to create and share your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.

Join us on Thursday June 17^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday June 18^th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

Webinar Overview – Motivating the Unmotivated Learner

Posted on May 23, 2010 by johart1

Introduction

The recorded Edublogs webinar of the 20th/21st of May was a fantastic session led by guest presenter Lynne Oakvik of the Learning Resources and Instructional Media Department, Broward County Public Schools, Florida.

I really enjoyed this session for the content and activities but also because I was able to participate more in text chat than is often possible while Lynne led the session ably supported by Phil Hart.

The Session

After the usual preliminaries and some introductory words from Lynne she took us straight to the heart of the matter by asking us to brainstorm the factors influencing student motivation. We had a very full whiteboard very quickly!

This first activity set the scene for a lively and well paced session. We moved on to look briefly at some of the possible overarching institutional strategies for supporting unmotivated (at risk) students. Next we shared individual strategies we had used with students. This again produced a well filled whiteboard as well as a busy chat stream. Lynne then summed up by showing, and asking for our input on, the outcomes from a report suggesting items that might be fundamental to keeping at risk students in education,

Conclusion

All in all this was a very interactive and thought provoking session and our thanks go to Lynne for giving us all such food for thought in such an effective way. As with most of these sessions this overview is no more than a fleeting glimpse and you will get much more from the recording.

Next week

Join us on Thursday May 27^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday May 28^th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

Two Webinar Overviews

Posted on May 22, 2010 by johart1

Introduction

Our missing recording has been found and is now available – Thank you to the Elluminate Support Team for their persistence finding this long after I had given up!

A combimation of pressure of work and miscellanous other issues including a lost recording for the first of these two sessions meant that I got so far behind on the overviews that this week I have done a combined overview for the week with the lost recording (Students are Students) and the following week’s Serendipity session. I will also be doing a separate post for the most recent webinar on motivating students.

Students are Students

Introduction

Unfortunately we have no recording available for this session which was very lively. Also I’m sorry for the delay in posting about this webinar but I was hoping that the recording would become available. If the recording goes eventually become available I will add it to the post and Tweet this. The post will be longer than usual because of the lack of recording, and will try to describe the activities and outcomes in rather more detail than the usual overview.

The Session

The focus of the session was on classroom management issues and on drawing some parallels between these issues in a face-to-face situation and in the virtual context. We began by inviting people to put their main classroom management issues on the whiteboard.

Then we grouped them to try and put similar ones together. This was slightly arbitrary as there is certainly a case for combining the “need/relevance” group with the “motivation/interest” group in that perceived irrelevance impacts on motivation. In my personal opinion, a perception that the class/work is not relevant is not the only reason for poor motivation and/or a high level of disinterest. So we ended up with six issues: behavioural; motivational; perception of need/relevance; attendance; parental pressure; differing “level”.

Using a series of polls we narrowed these down as it was not practical to consider them all – lack of motivation was a clear winner, we also took a brief look at the behavioural issue.

Motivation

In both cases we whiteboarded some of our own strategies for managing lack of motivation, mainly in a face-to-face context.

Several of these were described in much more depth by people who used them giving us a great “feel” for how they worked in a particular context. We also touched briefly on barriers to implementing some of these strategies including: the heavy demands made on the teacher by project based learning; and the requirement in some places for “seat time” where students have to be in class for set times – this precludes time-out options.

Behaviour

In the short time left before the end of the session we talked about managing potentially disruptive behaviours whatever the cause in both the face-to-face and virtual environments. Again we used whiteboard, text chat and audio. As before a variety of strategies were suggested although we lacked the time to explore these in more detail. However there were a range of ideas put forward in text and audio as well as on the whiteboard.

These included: involving parents; the use of ground rules – preferably wholly or partly developed by the students; invoking peer pressure; adopting calming techniques and removal of the student from the room. There was considerable discussion in text and audio about the factors that may contribute to behavioural issues. Two main possibilities were raised:

The almost continuous consumption by students of sweet beverages and “snack” foods high in sugar and other additives and the possibility of countering this by encouraging the drinking of water instead.
An increasing trend for shorter breaks (recesses) and less physical activity undertaken within those breaks leaving students with excess energy that may be channeled into disruptive behaviour.

Due to the time factor we didn’t really explore the behavioural issues in much depth. Although from my personal perspective they are much more significant in a face to face situation than is lack of motivation. This is because in my opinion an unmotivated student impacts mainly on their own learning whereas a student showing disruptive behavior impacts negatively on the learning of all the others in the class. Of course unmotivated students often move into disruption for various reasons and then this becomes a behavioural issue. In a virtual situation it can be easier to manage disruptive students by simply restricting their access to tools and so limiting their impact on others.

Conclusion

Finally we looked very briefly at our perceptions of a few of the advantages/disadvantages of face-to-face vs virtual with respect to motivation and behavior. Face-to-face was seen as having advantages in: seeing body language and in opportunities for teamwork, and disadvantages: in that the students know if you are having a bad day, and also in the potential for physical risk. Virtual has advantages in: the physical separation for reducing risk and minimising disruption through controlling access, and disadvantages in: not being able to pick up non-verbal cues and also the inablitity to see when students are “playing” rather than working’

Luckily (from my perspective as we have no recording available) there were few links shared during this session. One of our participants Heidi Chaves suggested this book for a variety of classroom management strategies.

Serendipity – the Place of Technology in Education

Introduction

Our regular Edublogs Serendipity unconference sessions are always enjoyable, not least because we have no idea at the beginning where we will go in our journey!

On this occasion we explored our perceptions of the place of technology in the schools of today and tomorrow. For this session as usual we have a recording link that is well worthviewing.

Overview

As often happens in these sessions the discussion was wide ranging touching on many of the well known issues around technology in education. This is very much the nature of the Serendipity sessions in contrast to our Fine Focus sessions where we endeavour to stay ”on topic”. In addition to audio and text chat we filled three whiteboards with thoughts and ideas!

Conclusion

With lively sessions such as this using the three communication strands of audio, text chat and whiteboard a post can only give a “taste” of the session, catch the recording for the full “flavour”.

Join us each week for our webinars alternate weeks we have:

Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session where you bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Edublogs Fine Focus – one of three strands “Talk Time” facilitated discussions on specific topics; “Tools and Strategies” where the focus is on the use of specific tools or strategies in a teaching and learning context; or “Techie How To” where we learn how to use a an application or tool

Same time each week on Thursday at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the Edublogs/Elluminate Community Partnership Elluminate room

Serendipity Webinar Overview – Web2.0 Tools

Posted on May 2, 2010 by johart1

Introduction

This weeks Edublogs Serendipity “unconference” webinar (recording here) was lively and full of great contributions from participants through audio and chat as well as on the whiteboard.

Overview of the Session

The topic of choice by a good margin was “useful suggenstions for Web2.0 Tools employed in the classroom”. We approached this by asking for favourites to be put on the whiteboard resulting a rapidly filled space and the potential for a great Wordle!

We then invited people to talk about those they had added to the whiteboard. This led to some great contributions about what the tools can be used for and examples of how they are being used in class. Of course we ran out of time and it just wasn’t possible to look at all the tools. However it’s a terrific list of tools to explore with more (and some links to other lists of tools) mentioned in the blended audio and text chat conversation as you will hear/see in the recording.

Overall a very interactive session which provided much food for learning and seemed to be enjoyed by all!

Next Week

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus!” session a mix of “Talk Time” and “Tools and Strategies” where we will compare issues and strategies around classroom management in the face to face and virtual contexts in “Students are students – real or virtual!”

Join us on Thursday May 6^that 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday May 7^th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

Serendipity Webinar – convert resources for e-learning

Posted on March 20, 2010 by johart1

A very lively recorded Serendipity session this week in the Edublogs/Elluminate Community Partnership room. The topic chosen was “helping people to convert materials for e-learning”. As usual in these sessions the discussion was wide ranging not just narrowly focused on the precise wording but including many stories from participants of e-strategies that they use and that provide terrific examples to help those needing to convert materials for e-learning. The microphone, text chat and whiteboard were all humming with activity giving us many ideas to consider.

Comments throughout and at the end suggested that much serendipitous learning had indeed occurred this week, and that we had lived up to our name. I think that the sessions always provide learning, food for thought and are engaging but it’s very exciting when we get a “Wow!” session such as this one. In my opinion these happen mostly when the topic chosen is broad, and links very strongly with the passions of participants.

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Tools and Strategies” where guest presenter Tomaz Lasic (teacher, coach & mentor) will present “Teaching with Moodle”. Currently at Moodle HQ where he is an interface between educators and Moodle developers. Tomaz has many Moodle stories to tell – today he will give us an overview and then throw the session open to questions (not-tech) about using Moodle “on the ground” Join us on Thursday March 25^th at 23:00 GMT (7pm USA EST, Midnight CET) or Friday March 26^th at 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room.

Serendipity – Two topics!

Posted on March 7, 2010 by johart1

Sorry for the delay in posting this everyone. I intended to finish it early Sunday morning but woke with a migraine, so lost the day until now.

Once again we had a dead heat for topics in our recent Serendipity unconference webinar. Those chosen were “Peer Support” arising out of discussion in previous webinars and “Education Reform” triggered by the mass firing of teachers in a US school and the reactions to this by prominent politicians. As always when we have two topics minds are focussed and we cover a lot of ground in a short time. For a better sense of the discussion checkout the recording.

Just a reminder for those of you new to our sessions that although we use the words: education, teacher and also school very often – this is generic and used for convenience. Our discussions are of education, teaching and learning institutions in the broadest sense and we have participants from across all sectors and also globally.

We started with Peer Support which generated a lively discussion starting with a variety of ideas about what constituted peer support. The consensus was that it covers a range of different interactions. In my own personal opinion it is an overarching term that includes peer mentoring and peer tutoring as well as teamwork activities. Several of us shared occasions when peer support had occurred either in a planned way or spontaneously in our classes. There was a feeling that this might be a topic to explore more fully in a focussed session perhaps by inviting several people to share strategies that had worked in their context.

The discussion on Education Reform was triggered by recent events in the US where all the teachers in a school were fired, this was stated to be because of poor student outcomes – thanks to Shelly Terrell for the link to this article and several other related ones that she provided in the text chat.

Again this topic was one that gave rise to enthusiastic discussion and revealed something approaching despair about what is happening to education systems worldwide and the impact on teachers.

The apparent continually increasing culture of blame with teachers on the receiving end is something which has a hugely negative effect on motivation and enthusiasm. Teachers who enter the education systems of the world generally do so with a passion for their work but you only have to look at the numbers of teachers who seem to be leaving education worldwide to see that disillusion is setting in on a large scale. As with the first topic this is one that seems to call for a more focussed session or even a series of sessions. It is certainly a perennial subject when teachers get together, and one which always seems to conclude that the only solution is to keep “chipping away”. However – from my very personal perspective it seems to be getting worse with teachers becoming more and more political and sociological scapegoats for the ills of society.

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus!” session a mix of “Techie How To” and “Tools and Strategies” where we will “play” with Elluminate whiteboards from the Moderator’s perspective in “White(board) Magic!”

Join us on Thursday March 11^th at 23:00 GMT (6pm USA EST, Midnight CET) or Friday March 12^th at 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room.